AppleInsider Comic: Steve Jobs and Gabe Newell talk Half-Life 2

Apple recently met with Valve Software to discuss porting Valve's Half-Life 2 gaming title to the Mac. The two parties failed to reach an agreement, however, as Valve co-founder Gabe Newell reportedly demanded a whopping $1 million advance just to get started. Our Joel Watson takes a behind-the-scenes look at how the negotiations between Newell and Steve Jobs may have played out in this week's AppleInsider comic.

Joel Watson is the creator of the webcomic, HijiNKS Ensue. He'll be crafting new AppleInsider comics on a regular basis and welcomes your suggestions and comments at joel@appleinsider.com.

In regards to the actual One Milllllion Dollars; I don't think that's much to ask for. Considering the popularity of Half-Life I'm sure they will sell well over a million copies for at least $35 bucks or more, that's at least $35 million right there. Not to mention that Apple itself has a pretty good history on shady business practices. So why are they so surprised when it's thrown back at them?

In regards to the actual One Milllllion Dollars; I don't think that's much to ask for. Considering the popularity of Half-Life I'm sure they will sell well over a million copies for at least $35 bucks or more, that's at least $35 million right there. No to mention that Apple itself has a pretty good history on shady business practices. So why are they so surprised when it's thrown back at them?

A million copies sold on the Mac side is a stretch. It sold 4-5 million copies on the PC side. There's maybe 5% as many Macs out there as there are PCs, and unfortunately a fair amount of those Macs have crappy integrated graphics, with no opportunity to upgrade, i.e. they wouldn't be able to run Half-Life 2, or wouldn't be able to run it well. \

So, you do the math. It wouldn't sell anywhere near a million copies on the Mac, though its possible it could still sell well enough to warrant the $1 million dollars.

One thing I'd like to add though is that $1 million dollars isn't really that much money in terms of game budgets anymore. There are games out there with $20-30 million dollar budgets now, after all.

Unfortunately, we only ever hear bits and pieces of the arguments that these guys have. It's rarely black and white in any negotiation. While Valve probably did ask for a Million to begin the port, theres probably much more to it. I imagine it went something like:

Valve:
Your OS is incomplete. There is no "easy" way to port our heavily DirectX game to your platform. We need you to add these things to which have no equivalent in your Operating system.

"Hands a list of changes involving months of work and lots of recources"

Apple:
We have several other Game developers that have no problem porting there Software to our platform, or have only required us to make minor alterations. We see no need to make our software easier to port to.

Valve:
Fine. We'll need 1 Million Dollars to do the job you guys should already be doing.

Apple:
We'll pass.

Both probably have legitimate arguments, but both are also probably tight wads and unwilling to compromise.